Video Doesn’t Kill Non-verbal Communication Stars!

Two principal types of nonverbal communication envelope language. Paralanguage comprises things non-verbal, including hisses, whistles, gurgles, giggles, sighs, and other wordless vocal variants. Kinesics refers to bodily movements. During the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers and learners have expressed frustration with an exasperating, exhausting way to socialize, that of faces-in-boxes videoconferencing, where paralanguage, kinesics, and other features of communication wrestle for attention, engulfing vocalics with video. Dependence upon technologies such as Zoom videoconferences is discomfiting, fraught with talk of human values, technology’s impact, and ways to meet diverse populations diversely, as new-style classrooms face the world online at a distance, learners linking to information across multifarious divides. This paper summarizes the disquiet that Zoom is not meeting the social, educational need students have to attain nonverbal communication competence for interactional, intercultural, interpersonal understanding. Four aspects of extra-verbal communication competence acquisition are described: Paralanguage, turn-taking, nimbleness in discussion, and vocabulary/grammar. These are shown as not only teachable extrinsically but learnable intrinsically, almost automatically via videoconference. They are presented as crucial in twenty-first century education, across the curriculum.

Katherine Watson
Santiago Canyon College
Orange, California, USA

This is in fact an autobio! I am the child of radio actors who became educators. Learning as much about as much as there is, is my deep desire. I have been teaching for more than half a century, at first in vegetable-picking fields and rude classrooms, then in brick-and-mortar, and finally online. My doctorates are in theoretical and applied linguistics; my subject matters range from anthropology and zoology through English, humanities, journalism, ESL, and French. My publications include literary and scientific translations French-English and English-French, as well as research in language learning and acquisition. I enjoy swimming in the open sea and sailing atop it; I love to write and to read, to dream and to imagine. I have participated in every single TCC!

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